Are Video Games Breeding An Assassination Generation?

I figured I'd use the same headline that Lt. Col Dave Grossman used in his article over at The Daily Beast for one simple reason: I want to invoke Betteridge's law of headlines.

Betteridge's law states, basically, that if a headline asks a question it should be answered with one, simple word: "No."

In 2009 Ian Betteridge responded to a TechCrunch article that used a similar headline which asked "Did Last.fm Just Hand Over User Listening Data To The RIAA?"

Betteridge wrote that the story was a "great demonstration of my maxim that any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word "no." The reason journalists use that style of headline is that they know the story is probably bullshit, and don't actually have the sources and facts to back it up, but still want to run it."

All of which describes perfectly what Grossman has penned for The Daily Beast, and explains why such a breathless, silly headline rests atop such a breathless, silly article.

Writer Andrew Marr made a very similar point in his 2004 book My Trade. Here's an excerpt:

If the headline asks a question, try answering 'no'. Is This the True Face of Britain's Young? (Sensible reader: No.) Have We Found the Cure for AIDS? (No; or you wouldn't have put the question mark in.) Does This Map Provide the Key for Peace? (Probably not.) A headline with a question mark at the end means, in the vast majority of cases, that the story is tendentious or over-sold. It is often a scare story, or an attempt to elevate some run-of-the-mill piece of reporting into a national controversy and, preferably, a national panic. To a busy journalist hunting for real information a question mark means 'don't bother reading this bit'.

That last line is good advice for anyone thinking about reading Grossman's article on video games breeding "a generation of assassins." In fact, it's so pertinent and on-point that I will make my rebuttal as short and sweet as possible.

The burden of proof when it comes to a correlation between video games and real world violence lies with the those making that accusation. It lies with those who have the audacity to critique the pastime of millions of people around the globe as something that creates killers out of normal people. After all, surely the hard data will back up their claims, if they're indeed accurate.

Alas, for those peddling this tired old nonsense, the data does not hold up, even at a cursory level.

Gun deaths are much higher in countries where gun ownership is higher. There are many countries with very high rates of video game playing and almost no gun deaths whatsoever, and extremely low violent crime overall. And even in the U.S. with its rather high murder rate, violent crime has fallen over the same period of time that video games have gone mainstream. This is all simply true and irrefutable. It is not based on soft science, but actual hard data on things that actually happen. Click any of the links I posted a couple paragraphs up to read more about it.

The soft science is more complicated, and it's easy to use it to confirm whatever bias you may have. Studies often contradict themselves and one another. We could draw from studies that say anything we want them to say and then fit them to match our predisposed theories very easily. Let's not do that. It's not how science is supposed to work.

Calls for regulating games---Grossman's suggestion---to keep them out of the hands of children are the same sort of arguments we've heard from prohibitionists and censors time and time again. They are the arguments of bullies and know-it-alls and should be scorned and ignored.

I have a better idea: Parents, take responsibility for the media your children consume. Play games with them. Talk to them about what TV shows they watch and the video games they play, and help them become smart, thoughtful human beings. This is a parent or guardian's role, not the governments, and not the job of people who think they can tell the rest of us how to behave and what we can do with our own lives in the confines of our own homes.

Of course, this Daily Beast piece is just one small piece of Grossman's argument. The rest can be found in his book "Assassination Generation: Video Games, Aggression, and the Psychology of Killing" which, as luck would have it, just released a couple days ago.

But whether it's a short internet article or full-blown book, the answer to the question remains the same. Do video games breed assassins?